Maro Itoje has slammed the racist abuse of the England footballers Marcus Rashford, Jaden Sancho and Bukayo Saka after their missed penalties in Sunday’s European Champions final shootout defeat to Italy.

The Lions second-row watched from South Africa and condemned the scenes that took place before the match.

“It’s appalling to be honest, appalling,” he said.

“Quite frankly, the behaviour of a fraction of the fans throughout the day wasn’t very good from what I was picking up over here in South Africa,  people storming the stadium.

“The behavior before the game wasn’t great and it only got worse after the game.

“I was speaking to one of my friends and I said ‘the behaviour before the game wasn’t good, but if England lose this game it’s going to get worse’. It’s a shame that a fraction of fans literally spoil the occasion for everybody else.

“There’s a large proportion of fans that went to Wembley, who bought their ticket, who are great football fans and did their piece. But they were ruined by a large amount of people who were racially abusing some of the black players, those brave individuals who stood up to take those penalties.

“It’s just incredibly sad to hear, sad to see; it’s sad that we even have to have this conversation in 2021 and this is a large amount of the reason why so much talk is about racism in sport because these incidents happen on a semi-regular basis, which is not what anyone wants to see.

“It’s not what anyone wants to hear and it’s become clichéd to say this but we need to do more. We need to do more to tackle it, we need to do more to get these types of people out of the stadium.

“We need to do more to tackle this type of football culture that ruins it for a large amount of people. The England team inspired the nation and inspired people all across the globe. For that to be tarnished by some of the behaviour and the abuse that we’ve seen is very disappointing.

“Nelson Mandela famously said that sport has the power to change people’s lives, sport has the power to unite people and I think the England team, they are the essence of that.”